Pages

Friday, January 15, 2016

A Syrian Response to Obama's Final State of the Union

“…instability will continue for decades in many parts of the
world…The world will look to us to help solve these problems, and our answer
needs to be more than tough talk or calls to carpet-bomb civilians... Leadership
means a wise application of military power, and rallying the world behind
causes that are right.” Thus Spake Zarobama

While I definitely cannot lay a
claim to representing all Syrians, home or abroad, and while I definitely
cannot represent the sentiments of pro-Assad Syrians—who, in fact, do exist—I
am willing to wager that there are millions of them who will agree with the
following view of President Barack Obama’s last state of the union address.

Most people, including most
Syrians, are quite willing to believe President Obama’s boast that the “United
States of America is the most powerful nation on Earth. Period.” And they
likely nodded in agreement when he said that “when it comes to every important
international issue, people of the world do not look to Beijing or Moscow to
lead—they call us.”

The trouble from a Syrian
perspective is that calling on the U.S.—and President Obama—for help is exactly
what the Syrian people have been doing for years, ever since the early months
of their revolution back in 2011, when pro-democracy protesters were marching
peacefully, demanding respect for their basic rights, and giving the world a
reason to hope. As President Obama himself noted at a time: “we see it in the courage of those who brave bullets while
chanting, 'peaceful,' 'peaceful.'” Syria’s peaceful pro-democracy activists
could never understand why President Obama chose to turn his back on them,
allowing the regime to get away with mass murder, and for radical forces to
emerge and hijack their revolution. In the meantime, when their oppressor called
on his friends, Iran and Russia, for help, they came rushing in.

Syrians, in other words, did not
look to Iran or Russia; they called America, who didn’t answer. Assad,
meanwhile, called Iran and Russia. And they did answer.

What happens to a world when “the
most powerful nation on Earth. Period.” chooses to turn its back on peaceful
prodemocracy protesters? We don’t really have to wonder. Just look at Syria
today and you’ll have your answer. Where there was a nonviolent protest
movement braving the odds, there is now a civil war. Where there were secular
and nationalist forces fighting for their freedom, there are now extremists on
all sides muddying the waters, making life hell for civilians and creating a
security nightmare for many a nation around the world. When “the most powerful
nation on Earth. Period.” chooses to turn its backs on those great
responsibilities that come with great power, what alternatives are prodemocracy
activists and normal citizens interested in leading peaceful dignified subsistence
left with?

In the bizarre verbiage of
international relations thought, this approach is for some reason called
realism.

But are quagmire and
nonintervention really the only choices that America has when it comes to
Syria? This is what President Obama seemed to be suggesting not just in his
State of the Union but in many previous statements too. When he seemed to be
criticizing Donald Trump’s anti-everybody not-like-us utterances in his address
on Tuesday, he seemed briefly to hail from a different, better world than the
one he embraced through this reductionism of his. In fact, he seemed to
remember that a certain moral courage is part of the American value system: “We
made change work for us, always extending America’s promise outward, to the
next frontier, to more people. And because we did, because we saw opportunity
where others saw peril, we emerged stronger and better than before.”

Of course, the President did not
shy away completely from intervention; he made a point to mention the fate of
Bin Ladin. So, in practice, his boast about America’s power boils down to a
creed more Roman than American: we are the greatest power on Earth, and
by virtue of our power, we have interests everywhere, and we will intervene to
protect them, but we won’t care about anything or anyone else.

When you deal with the world
armed with such a mentality, don’t expect that it won’t reverberate at home,
and don’t be surprised that there will emerge people on the domestic scene who
will adopt a similar attitude against compatriots whom they deem lesser than
themselves. In short, if Trump represents one side of the coin called
arrogance, Obama represents its other side. Trump wants us to fear the others
in our midst, and all around us, Obama merely wants us to be indifferent to
their suffering. The first calls us names, the other merely treats us as
nobodies, as a people who cannot be motivated by a simple desire for freedom,
but only by a desire to settle some centuries old vendettas.

This brings me to Obama’s
willingness to refer to the current situation in the Middle East as “a
transformation … rooted in conflicts that date back millennia.” This used to be
how the right wing referred to the Middle East. It used to be a vocabulary that
liberals like Obama spent their time decrying. Now we have the right wing
speaking of democracy promotion, while the left falls on dangerous stereotypes
to justify its unwillingness to lead even a humanitarian intervention. Not too
long ago, it was the left that lobbied hard to ensure the adoption of the
Responsibility to Protect, a legal doctrine for the specific purpose of
justifying intervention in situations such as the one that has unfolded
in Syria since 2011. Its abnegation by Obama, one of its erstwhile supporters,
undermines his own moral outrage against Trump’s racism. When you are the
President of the “most powerful nation on Earth. Period,” your sense of humanity
cannot have a geographical border. It has to be coterminous with your power’s
reach.

That power could have made a lot
of difference in Syria and elsewhere, without the need for full-scale
invasions.

“True
wisdom comes to each of us when we realize how little we understand about life,
ourselves, and the world around us.” –Scorates

The conflicts in the Middle East
have nothing to do with what happened a thousand years ago, a fact a person
with President’s Obama’s academic background should know well. Some Middle
Eastern leaders might use such rhetoric to inflame sentiments, but the reality
is far simpler: on the one hand we have a greedy, corrupt, and authoritarian
ruling elite fleecing its people, and using them as fodder for wars meant to
expand their influence and enrich their coffers. On the other hand, we have
people whose yearning for freedom is strong and genuine, though some of them
do, indeed, have legitimate concerns when it comes to radical change. Those
concerns could have been alleviated through international mediation.

Of course, the situation is now
complicated by the presence of too many radical Islamist groups, including
Al-Nusra Front, the Islamic State and many others. The rise of these groups put
the moderates and liberal forces between a rock and a hard place. Now they have
to fight on multiple fronts, with little support from anyone. Even when the
U.S. finally offered some support, it was made conditional on fighting IS only:
the rebels were expected to focus on fighting IS even as the regime, now with
Russian air and tactical support, focused on fighting them. As the number of
moderates dwindled, with many of them taking their families and leaving the
country and others refusing to join America’s training programs on such
foolish terms, the Obama administration did an about-face on its commitment to
Assad’s removal. It is now working with the Syrian branch of the PKK to
defeat IS in the northeastern parts of Syria, which will give secessionist
Kurds their coveted enclave there, and with Sunni tribes motivated by the
promise of establishing their own Sunnistan, in order to take over other areas
in the north currently controlled by IS. This will leave the fate of the
rest of Syria to be decided in the ongoing battles pitting Islamist and
moderate rebels against the Russians, Iranians, Hezbollah units and pro-Assad
Shia and Alawite militias.

By showing indifference to mass
slaughter and dismissing the idea of humanitarian intervention as tantamount to
creating another Vietnam or Iraq, President Obama in his own way has helped
diminish America in the eyes of the world, just as he allowed Syria to diminish
and be torn apart.

Yet now we have to listen to the
President waxing poetic about the meaning of leadership, saying that
“Leadership means a wise application of military power, and rallying the world
behind causes that are right.”

Understand how this translates to
a Syrian: I never thought your cause was right, which is why I never
rallied anyone behind it.

President Obama spoke of
conflicts in the Middle East lasting a generation, but here is what he did not
tell us: what kind of a region, what kind of a world, does he expect to
see in a generation, as he leaves extremists, terrorists, mass murders and
Russian and Iranian imperialists to shape unmolested our realities, and as
he leaves pro-democracy forces with no one to help them?

Go ahead, patronize me!

About Ammar

Ammar Abdulhamid is a Syrian-American author and pro-democracy activist based in Silver Spring, Maryland. He is the founder of the Tharwa Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to democracy promotion. His personal website and entries from his older blogs can be accessed here.

The Delirica

The Delirica is a companion blog to the Daily Digest of Global Delirium meant to highlight certain DDGD items by publishing them as separate posts. Also, the Delirica republishes articles by Ammar that appeared on other sites since 2016. Older articles can be found on Ammar's internet archive: Ammar.World